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The dissection, or cutting apart, and examination of a dead body is called autopsy. Also called postmortem (from the Latin for “after death”), or necropsy, it is usually used to determine the cause of death or to observe the effects of disease.

An autopsy is performed by a pathologist, a medical doctor with special training in analyzing body tissues and substances. The pathologist examines the body both externally and by removing organs and tissue samples. The modern autopsy often includes highly specialized scientific instruments and procedures. These can extend the examination to body structures too small to be seen except with an electron microscope and to chemical analyses that reveal concentrations of only a few parts per billion.

Although often associated only with forensic, or legal, medicine in the determination of the cause or details of death from foul play, the autopsy serves a number of other purposes as well. It provides opportunities for the salvage of organs and hormones for use in medical treatment of living persons. It is invaluable in the anatomical education of physicians. It is also very important in studying how and why certain illnesses cause death and what happens to the various body systems in illness.

The first dissections for the study of disease were done by the Alexandrian physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus in about 300 bc. The Greeks and Indians cremated their dead without examination. The Romans, Chinese, and Muslims all had taboos about opening the body. Human dissections were not permitted in the West during the Middle Ages. Not until the rebirth of anatomy in the Renaissance was it possible to distinguish the abnormal from the normal. Leonardo da Vinci dissected 30 corpses, noting abnormal anatomy. His anatomical drawings are well-known. The autopsy came of age with Giovanni Morgagni, the Italian father of modern pathology, who in 1761 described what could be seen in the body with the naked eye. The gross (naked-eye) autopsy reached its culmination with the Viennese Karl von Rokitansky in the 19th century. It was the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow who in 1858 promoted the cellular doctrine—that changes in cells are the basis of the understanding of disease—in both pathology and autopsy. He established that all cells come from preexisting cells and that disease is altered cell function or altered relations or both.

Ann Giudici Fettner

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